Afterwards, What's Left to Come Home to?
by hililjilkadf
Summary: After the war, what is left for its heroes and villains? With the violent struggle between light and dark finally settled for the time being, the war's major players must learn how to live in a time of peace and find meaning in smaller things. Will inc
1. Retrieval of a Lost Love

Disclaimer: The characters, settings and world used in this piece are borrowed from JK Rowling's _Harry Potter_ book series.

**Retrieval of a Lost Love**

He lived—that's what he was famous for after all—in a home built on the site of his first home at Godric's Hollow. It was expected; it seemed significant, so he took the original warding stone that the Order had used and placed it in the center of the lot and built around it. As soon as it was finished, he moved his trunk's worth of possessions from his room in the late headmaster's old quarters to the empty structure and stared at the white paint on the blank walls until morning.

Year zero, the year of the duel that reset the balance of good and evil, reset the world to the way it was supposed to be and reset calendars everywhere, the Ministry and Order had decided to give him the deed to the lot. It had never been his parents' to own like he thought it had; the Order had used it as a safe house for years to harbor whatever families or aurors were most at risk. The new building looked like the original shown in old newspaper clippings from seventeen years before the dual, 17 BD. Now, two years after the house was built, four years after he had sworn never to return to the only other house he could remember living in, he realized that he had left something important behind and needed to go back.

Leaving was supposed to have been forever, but he forgot something and had to return to retrieve it. He took the Knight Bus back. He could have Apparated, but it felt important somehow that he arrive the way he had left. That choice had been his alone at a time when choices were rare and precious. Leaving had felt like picking raspberries in warm fields barefoot and tire swings and mud puddles—at least he thought it must be like all these things; he couldn't know for sure. Leaving was supposed to have been forever, but he forgot something and had to return to retrieve it.

The Knight Bus was still so garishly comical that he could hardly believe it was real, just like the last time. Some things didn't change. Some things did. The bus came to a screeching halt and he was flung forward with all the awkwardness of his youth. He never was able to master magical travel. Thanking the driver, his hair pushed down over his forehead by a cheap muggle hat, the Lord and Savior of the Light, the Man Who Won, Who Saved Us All, stepped out in front of just Harry's home.

There was a wizarding plaque for a tacky war tour next to a flower bed lined with the rows of pastel tulips just Harry had tended after the last frost in his younger years and in the summer months a bit later. "The childhood home of Harry Potter from 17 to 2 BD, still inhabited by his muggle aunt, uncle and cousin." Dudley had never left. The thought made the man laugh. Just Harry would have laughed too.

Muggles were supposed to see a fire hydrant, or so he had been told. He saw a plaque bearing an engraving of two young boys playing with a ball while a tall woman and an obese man stood gazing at them fondly from a wooden porch. The Savior tried to imagine what just Harry would have thought about the engraved plaque. He wanted to sneer, but just Harry would have been secretly delighted and a little bit smug at his relatives' reactions to the purple robed men and the women with pointy hats hugging a fire hydrant and snapping pictures at all times of the day.

But the dangerous looking defense master did not come to take pictures in front of the flower bed, an arm draped around the fire hydrant, with a cheap, careless smile across his face. He came to find something left behind from a time when he was still just Harry.

The last time just Harry had opened the front door, he had been hiding wrapped up in his invisibility cloak, feeling oddly like the fifth marauder beneath the full moon. He remembered expecting to see Sirius like the time he had ran away, three years before he had run away for what was supposed to have been forever. Professor Potter did not need his cloak to be invisible anymore and he no longer expected or hoped for his godfather's return. Still, he stared at the bushes and imagined a mass of black fur and dug out his father's invisibility cloak from the knapsack he had worn when he had made his escape four years ago.

"Alohomora," he whispered as his hand passed over the doorknob. This, the only magic he had ever intentionally done at 4 Privet Drive. He waited, but no Ministry owls came—why would they? Still, it felt unfair that the Man Who Won would be afforded this little freedom when it didn't matter anymore and the Boy Who Lived had not been afforded anything even when nothing else could have mattered more.

Silently, Potter crept into just Harry's childhood prison, still inhabited by his muggle aunt, uncle and cousin. He knelt down in front of an oddly shaped door that was wide at the hinges and tapered down paralleling the descending stairs. The professor's head shook free of the cloak. His finger tips brushed the space between the door and the frame, collecting a pinch of dust. He breathed in the dust—the comfort and security it provided like the scent of a lost loved one's favorite shirt. Closing his eyes, he imagined it smelled of a mother's embrace. He moved trembling, dusty hands to teary eyes and anointed himself with the holy ash of sacrificed innocence and love.

A crying man and a lonely child reached to open the cupboard door and crawled onto the long forgotten cot. Harry Potter's arms wrapped around his knees as he listened to the nighttime sounds of a shifting and settling house. There was a pulsing, rushing noise that seemed to come from the walls and a steady beating sound from the sitting room's grandfather clock. He thought of the blood magic that made him need to call this house home for so many years. Harry reached out to touch the piece of wood covering an old mouse hole where he had carved "Harry Potter's Cupboard." It still was his cupboard, a small room all his own. It was morbid and dark but he found comfort in thinking of his mother's death as his own too.

Harry closed the cupboard door and fell asleep nestled in the death, blood and love he had left behind because he hadn't known it was there, hadn't known how to take it with him, and hadn't known he would miss it after too many raspberries left him sick and too many mud puddles left him cold and too long on the tire swing left him confused and bare feet left him hurt.


	2. Hellebore Can't Purge You of the Past

**Hellebore Can't Purge You of the Past**

Snape was never really Severus. He rarely got close enough to anybody to be used to hearing his given name. This was true before the duel, but was more so after it. Now, the only people that had called him Severus were dead. So Snape, not Severus, stood behind a workbench in the middle of the crumbling walls that were his private potions lab after the duel, preparing a bottle of essence of hellebore.

His skilled hands added half of the liquid to the murky green sludge in his black cauldron. He watched, mesmerized by its contents which turned a calm blue after releasing a sickly yellow vapor. Inspired and desperate, Snape grabbed the bottle and poured what remained over his hands, rubbing them together in a frenzied ablution. There was no sudden calm or abrupt release of anything corrupting and ethereal. He threw the now empty bottle onto the table, smashing his hand into the shattered glass, furious with himself for being hopeful, stupid, human.

The blood ran down his arm in two distinct rivers, separate only until they reached the tip of his elbow from which the red dripped, forming a single, growing pool on the tabletop.

The broken glass didn't seem out of place surrounded by the rubble left after the war. A quick "Evanesco" could have cleared the debris; a few more complicated repairing charms would have been enough to return the room to the way it had been before the final battle. The dungeons—all of the Slytherin domain, had been left in ruins and all of it save for Snape's private lab in the heart of the castle had been quickly fixed by eager, ever happy house elves before the bodies had even been removed.

"Severus, I trust you," Tom had threatened two years ago, intolerant of failure.

"Don't," Snape thought but promised his master the draught of immortality and, by the prophecy's claim, Potter's death.

"Severus, I trust you," Albus had sighed two years ago, weary of his spy's self doubt.

"Don't," Snape thought but promised his master Potter's life and a weakness in the potion.

So, two years ago, Snape had sat in his lab brewing a single potion for both his masters, waiting for the arrival of his apprentice through the floo. His presence in the grate would be enough to trip the school's wards and alert Albus and the Order in the next room of Riddle's imminent coming.

Draco came and unknowingly alerted the Dark Lord that the dungeons were safe through the dark mark on his arm and unintentionally alerted the headmaster that the battle would soon begin.

Kingsley was the first one through the door. Draco, just under eighteen, didn't have to die, and Kingsley, an auror and Order member, wasn't supposed to until at least after the battle had begun. But all false bravado and very real fear, Snape's godson shouted the killing curse. He missed of course, but the power behind it knocked him back into the potions shelves. He fell unconscious, as glass ingredient bottles shattered against his pale flesh—such a very muggle way to die. The leaking potions stock covered the body in a deadly green soup that prevented Snape from coming too near his dying apprentice.

Tom came through a moment later, sealed off the potions lab, used a cutting curse to torture the auror for information and effortlessly cast an Avada Kedavra, killing the man. After checking the potion's progress, Tom left Snape to his brewing and joined the fifty odd Death Eaters attacking the Order in the Great Hall.

Snape remembered adding fresh unicorn blood to the potion while together, Draco and Kingsley's deaths painted the floor an unsettling, Gryffindor red.

The potions master shook his head, pulling himself back to the present. No, he would not clear the rubble from the lab for some time yet. After washing the blood from his hands, Snape walked deliberately to the staff room. He hoped McGonagall wouldn't have anything for him to brew.


	3. Missing a Pain in the Forehead

**Missing a Pain in the Forehead**

Harry Potter returned to Godric's Hollow to collect his belongings before apparating to Hogsmeade a week before the start of term. He didn't have to be back at Hogwarts officially until the Welcoming Feast, but living alone no longer sat well with him. The defense professor awkwardly carried two trunks as he made his way through the village back towards the castle. After almost dropping the heavier of the two, he thought to cast a levitation charm but quickly dismissed the idea as frivolous. After the final dual such everyday uses of magic seemed irreverent and thoughtless and reminded him too much of Lockhart, Malfoy and Skeeter.

A round, grandfatherly man half waddled, half jogged out of his shop toward a now clearly struggling Harry. Without so much as a "here, let me help you," the small man cast a feather-light charm on the trunks, and ruffled the young professor's hair before returning to the dingy bookstore from which he had emerged.

Long after Harry had grown too old for it to be appropriate, complete strangers continued to ruffle his hair. He was short and boyish well into adulthood, but no one in the wizarding world ever mistook him for younger than he was. How could they, when the ends of the last two international wars were dated with references to his age? "Nineteen years ago, when Harry Potter was only one year old, he defeated the most powerful Dark Lord that ever was in all the history of wizardry," bearded wizards would half whisper to little children with the same animated tone and wild facial expressions they used to explain Santa at Christmas time. Mothers who could no longer tolerate their grown sons loitering about the house would bemoan their lot and wonder aloud why their twenty year old children can't so much as find a job when Harry Potter had not two years ago rid the world of the threat of Voldemort, the Death Eaters and a corrupt minister all at the tender age of eighteen. He may have looked not quite sixteen, but the hair rufflers had to have known that the Savior was no longer a teenager. Harry couldn't understand the phenomenon and did his best to ignore it just like he had learned to ignore the entire wizarding world outside of the walls of Hogwarts.

By the time he reached his quarters, the defense professor's mind was drifting in unpleasant directions. He had come to the realization that it didn't bode well for people with pasts to be alone with their thoughts for any substantial length of time. Acting upon this theory and terrified of where his memories might take him, Harry sought out the staff common room.

Minerva and Flitwick were seated side by side in oversized armchairs positioned near a work table. They seemed to be discussing some element of magical theory and didn't even look up from the many open books laid out in front of them when the defense professor threw himself onto the worn couch at the other end of the room. His colleagues' voices were reassuring, but Harry couldn't help but feel the painful reality of a solitude he had only known since after the final battle. There was something red and dangerous missing from the back of his mind. Except for the occasional moments when it would thrust itself painfully to the forefront of his consciousness, Harry had barely noticed the presence until it was gone. There was no longer any trace of the thing that had shared a dwelling with his soul, and the young man's thoughts echoed in the emptiness of the vacated space, a constant reminder that his world had changed.

Left to his own thoughts, Harry was quickly lulled into a calm trance by his former professors' quiet chatter. He had been staring mindlessly at a portrait of a purple robed figure for nearly half an hour when Snape walked in. "Potter," the potions master said in his typical, uniquely distant form of greeting.

"Severus," Harry murmured still lost in thought, his eyes never moving from the portrait. Unsettled, Snape looked questioningly at an unresponsive Harry. With a curt nod he dismissed the boy's strange behavior and sat in a chair a few feet to the side, far enough from the transfiguration and charms professors to avoid being drawn into their lively conversation.

Snape was in no mood for Minerva's too cheerful banter and overly helpful suggestions or for Filius's tendency to discuss the most petty and mundane charms with a bouncy, intellectual exuberance that was almost frightening. He left the two to their examination of the difficulties associated with enchanting magically animated objects and allowed his mind to drift. The former death eater's eyes focused on a crease in his woolen robes, two inches down from his left elbow.

After some time, Snape turned to look at the Potter boy and followed the young professor's gaze to the portrait on the wall. A familiar, bearded man smiled benevolently at him from the ornate frame before choosing a particularly round lemon drop and depositing it in his mouth. Potter watched as Snape withdrew his attention from the former headmaster and again focused on his left sleeve.

"I miss him too."

"Which one?" Snape quipped sarcastically.

"Both of them," Harry said with more gravity than Snape had expected. The potions master's eyes darted up to a spot just above the boy's glasses before quickly looking away.

Harry rose to leave, suddenly feeling guilty and tainted. On the way back to his rooms he ran into the gaggle of war orphans Minerva had allowed to stay during the summer months. "At least the wizarding world has managed to learn something from Voldemort," Harry silently mused; he was in a particularly ungenerous mood. As usual, the group was clamoring with excited discussions about one of Hagrid's many "pets." The half-giant had let the children into his heart as he was wont to do with any friendless creature or lonely soul that crossed his path.

Acutely aware of the invisible barrier that kept him from sharing in these children's innocence, Harry unconsciously reached a longing hand out towards two students lagging behind their friends. He caught himself and quickly stopped his hand which was now only inches away from a first year who had been slowed down by the burden of supporting her crippled older brother. The girl looked up at her professor questioningly. Harry shook his head, smiled and ruffled her hair before sending the siblings on their way.


	4. Answering a Call to Change

Disclaimer: The characters, settings and world used in this piece are borrowed from JK Rowling's Harry Potter book series.

Answering a Call to Change

Snape watched the oblivious heir to both the Dark Lord and Dumbledore leave the common room and shortly thereafter felt the familiar pull in his left forearm. How anyone who radiated as much pure magical energy as Harry could remain so obtuse about the extent of his own power was beyond Snape's comprehension. The newly freed pawn caught himself getting up to answer the "summons," an instinct left over from a bygone era, and then decided to go ahead and, just this once follow the magical pull. He could feel Harry in his quarters near the Astronomy Tower. Snape briefly wondered if the other Death Eaters felt the tingling of power as well and if they had guessed what it might have meant by now.

To say that he had secretly liked the boy before his glorious defeat of the Dark Lord would be outright self-deceit. Snape was honest enough to know that his coming to value Harry had everything to do with the death of Voldemort. To the potion master's relief, he could at least console himself with the fact that he was not one of the Boy-Who-Lived's many mindless sycophants that seemed to be constantly underfoot as of late. No, Harry did not gain Snape's approval by killing the Dark Lord per say, but instead, either through Gryffindorish honor or, more likely, sheer ignorance and naiveté, not stepping up to replace Albus and Tom as the leader of the magical world. After the deed was done and Harry's power was proven, the boy sunk into himself rather than taking his place as Snape's personal master and the grand manipulator of the entire wizarding world in the tradition of the most powerful wizards that had come before him.

Finally reaching the child's doors, Snape raised his hand to rap three sharp knocks. "Come in," came the confused sounding reply muffled by the too thick door and the portrait guardian's ostentatious frame.

Harry had been laying strewn across his bed, as was his habit of late, listening to Fawkes' honey like soul balm. That the phoenix sung almost constantly now, that he never stopped or seemed to tire didn't give Harry pause. It might have in his youth, when the bird was still wrapped in myth and fantasy, when everything magic was still magical; but now that the bird should sing or not sing was a thought decidedly mundane. Harry could still remember imagining some mysterious bond connecting his mentor to the phoenix in an abstract, spiritual way. At one time he had even thought of the immortal bird as a manifestation of the mortal man's soul. The thought that had seemed self evident while Albus lived, had become obviously inane now that his ashes lay scattered about the grounds.

Feeling unsettled by his mind's wonderings, he had found himself desperately longing for some company. The precise knocking that could only be Severus was a welcome but unanticipated relief from Harry's solitude.

The potions master entered with the usual drama. His eyes took in Harry and his quarters with a scientific coolness. The magically powerful phoenix that was now perched on Harry's shoulder was at odds with his boyish pose. Harry's face looked up at his colleague in confusion. Snape was right; Potter remained unaware of the summons. Naiveté and ignorance then, not Gryffindorish virtue.

After waiting for and not receiving a vocal response to his confusion from his imposing guest, Harry suddenly looked self conscious of the rather relaxed arrangement of his limbs on the bed. Stumbling in his haste to right himself, the defense professor blushed and stuttered something to the effect of "Please come in." Snape was already in but decided to spare the flustered boy from his derisiveness just this once.

"A professor at twenty! A man!" Snape's thoughts seemed to scoff. Harry was a boy despite his colleagues' blindness to the fact and regardless of the boy's own assertions to the contrary. His tendency to vocalize assertions of his adulthood was so remarkably adolescent that it was a wonder Molly ever let the boy live on his own in that tribute to some misplaced sentiment he mistook for a home. Snape made a move to straighten the papers stacked around him and stopped himself.

As the potions professor contemplated his former student, Harry's discomfort grew increasingly obvious. "I have come to request an appointment to discuss your lesson plans for the coming year," came Snape's improvised excuse a few moments too late to feel natural.

The request was one Harry had yet to hear in two years of teaching, but a lingering fear of his former professor kept him from voicing the observation. After some thought Harry decided it was a natural request for a deputy headmaster to have. "I am not busy now."

Snape was not busy right then either, but decided after being in the presence of the boy who had, by all magical laws, more or less inherited ownership of him, that he could not stomach being too agreeable. "Your schedule is not the only one that must be taken into account. As it is, I am available tomorrow at four. If it is convenient, shall we meet in my quarters then?" Harry nodded his assent.

Fawkes took a rather regal stance and then flew in front of Snape to trill an incomprehensible musical oration that made the professor feel both comforted and unaccountably small. The potions master returned to his rooms, acutely aware of the tendrils of magic that extended throughout the school fluttering slightly. He was reminded of leaves before a spring storm.


End file.
